Bridport has become known as the leading Arts community in the West Country and our annual Open Studios event celebrates this vibrant Visual Arts Scene. Started in 1999 by Caroline Ireland, the event has grown over the years to become a distinctive showcase for the Artists who live and work in West Dorset.

This year 90 of West Dorset’s Finest Artists, Designers and makers invite you to share a fascinating glimpse into their creative process.There will be a wide variety of visual arts to enjoy including painting, printmaking, illustration, ceramics, jewellery, textiles, glass, furniture and sculpture.

We encourage you to engage in conversation with the artists, seizing your opportunity to discover more about their creative process and view their most recent work. Our Open Studio event offers the rare opportunity to buy original work directly from the Artists, as well as cards and prints.

Enjoy a two-man show by two contemporary landscape painters: James Ursell alongside Kit Glaisyer.

Open 24 & 25 June, 1 & 2 July, and 8 & 9 July, from 11-5pm.

James Ursell is a guest artist at the Garden Flat Gallery for two weekends, showing in the studio alongside resident artist Kit Glaisyer.

The two artists have known one another since meeting at an Art Residency in Dorset in 1999. While Kit remained in Bridport, inspired by the local West Dorset landscape, James moved his family to Herefordshire, building his own studio in his garden overlooking the Black Mountains.

A review of James's recent paintings in The Keep Magazine: The latest series of paintings by James Ursell have a colour palette reminiscent of the Vorticists’ early 20th Century work, along with a fuzy focus on the real and imagined, crepuscular and strange. Welcome to a slow somnambulating journey through James Ursell’s beautiful yet sombre landscapes, a place inhabited by hypnagogic forms. Inspired by his (mis)rememberings of the Herefordshire borders, of “places and times that, like it or not, stick in the mind and resonate”.

His subjects are highly evocative. A burst of birds in flight, the presence and force of a monumental humpbacked mountain rising in the landscape. The vitality of place does not only act as inspiration but oozes, permeating outwards with a gradual mesmeric effect. Sometimes the human figure is present yet codified, a head on the canvas’s margins or a mottled form set within a magical setting.

Artist Kit Glaisyer & Curator Nina JesihInvite you for an afternoon of Art, Mind & Music

at Garden Gallery 48, Great Pulteney Street, Bath, UK

From 4.00pm on Sunday 18th June

Salon48 is planning a series of regular and informal social events over long Sunday afternoons, following the themes of Art, Mind & Music. A diverse group of invitees will be encouraged to mingle and connect in conversation nourished by food, drink and music, along with short presentations by special guests from a range of creative and cerebral disciplines.

Dan Bendel lives in Bristol, and constructs animated realities in various mediums that are often in a state of flux. His practice includes interactive installations, wearable sculptures, drawings and collaborative carvings.

Ellie Preston lives in West Bay, Dorset, and creates paintings that combine elements of art history, pop culture, film and photography with disparate personal associations to form elusive but compelling narratives.

Kit Glaisyer lives in Bath and Bridport, and explores a heightened natural reality: his landscape paintings are informed by ideas of the Romantic and the Sublime: a utopian reality drawn from direct experience of nature, enhanced by childhood memories, and informed by grand fictional tropes and their cinematic interpretations.

Martha Moopette lives in Bridport, Dorset, and makes humorous, surreal and faux-naïve pop videos and films peopled with herself and her family, with hand-made sets, often within her own domestic setting.

Jon Adam lives in West Bay, Dorset, and works in oil on canvas and board, exploring non-figurative mark-making to construct a parallel space for extrapolating intangible emotions and metaphysical ideas.

Paul Newman lives in Castle Carey and creates monochrome graphite works where nature is explored primarily through the elements or wood, stone, water and air. His Zen-like drawings evoke a parallel experience of reality through a form of meditation that is then transcribed with patience and simplicity.

The Garden Flat Gallery is a new art space at 48 Great Pulteney Street, in Bath, run by artist Kit Glaisyer as both a Gallery and working studio. It will be open from 12-4pm for the 17 days of the Fringe Arts Festival.